


For a Given Value of Pie

by foggiestnotion



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Banter, Dorks in Love, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Night Vale History, Pie, Thanksgiving, The Thanksgiving Day Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 04:21:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2678933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foggiestnotion/pseuds/foggiestnotion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil attends the Thanksgiving Day Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest, always. It is his patriotic duty, and as someone who loves his country (despite the unsavory racial politics of its Reptilian founders) and his town (despite its byzantine tax system), he does not scoff at that.</p><p>Also, the Thanksgiving Day Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest is the one time during the year when it is governmentally condoned—no, governmentally <em>encouraged</em>—to throw pie at Steve Carlsberg’s face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For a Given Value of Pie

**Author's Note:**

> Some days you just wake up with a thing you want to write. It is usually weird. It is never any of your end-of-term papers.

Cecil attends the Thanksgiving Day Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest, always. It is his patriotic duty, and as someone who loves his country (despite the unsavory racial politics of its Reptilian founders) and his town (despite its byzantine tax system), he does not scoff at that.

Also, the Thanksgiving Day Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest is the one time during the year when it is governmentally condoned—no, governmentally _encouraged_ —to throw pie at Steve Carlsberg’s face.

That’s how the contest works. The difference between winning and losing is a face-full—or, in the case of the truly horrendous impersonators, many face-fulls—of pie. Not only is it a festive, joy-filled way of showing extreme disapproval, the wasting of valuable food resources harkens back to the now-defunct Night Vale practice of throwing the town’s food stores into Radon Canyon to mark the beginning of the traditional Month of Starvation, a celebration that played a vital role in early population management.

Many families bake their own pies together in preparation for the contest. Many families bake many, many pies so they can make the extent of their displeasure at friends’ and neighbors’ slapdash costumes and poorly conceived verbal caricatures well-known.

Cecil, however, does not bake, and he only ever needs one pie, which is easy enough to buy at the Ralphs the night before, as long as he remembers to wear shoes that are good for jumping the holiday season police barricade.

He has determined through trial and error over the years that his preferred pie for the job is pumpkin topped with a high mound of whipped cream.

He is currently holding a pumpkin pie topped with a high mound of whipped cream. He jeers among the jeering crowd of townspeople who are holding aloft variations on apple, cranberry, and gooey pecan and elbows his way to the front as Steve Carlsberg takes the podium.

Even before Cecil can fully see him around the tall ceremonial hats of the people in front of him, even before Steve begins to speak, Cecil feels an intense sickening dread in the pit of his stomach that far surpasses the usual sickening dread he feels whenever he thinks about Steve Carlsberg.

Steve Carlsberg speaks in a voice that sounds nothing at all like Carlos’s wonderful voice.

He is wearing an open, white, button-down dress-shirt that looks nothing at all like any of Carlos’s perfect and beautiful lab coats.

“Science,” Steve Carlsberg titters, and that. Is _It._

“No,” Cecil croaks, and a few nearby townspeople dart him sharp, reproving glances.

“No!” he says, louder, and somebody shushes him.

“NO!” Cecil shouts, and everyone turns, bodily, to look at him.

“Carlos,” Cecil says, and his voice comes out a hoarse whisper. He clears his throat and shouts, “CARLOS ISN’T DEAD. HOW _DARE_ YOU, STEVE CARLSBERG.”

He would hurl his pumpkin pie at Steve Carlsberg, right this instant, but it feels impossibly heavy, like an M2 machine gun in the hands of a toddler. He can’t move his arms. He can’t move at all.

The crowd is still. Steve Carlsberg doesn’t say anything. No one says anything. Slowly, Steve Carlsberg shakes his head, and gives him a look like—pity. It’s pity.

The faces of everyone in the crowd, all looking at him, soften into the same look.

“He’s not dead,” repeats Cecil. “He’s not.”

“Don’t make a scene now,” Josie says gruffly, beside him. She lays her hand—the one that isn’t hefting a flan—on his shoulder.

He hears a wail. The brows of the faces of all the people in the crowd tighten in unison. They are sad for him. He is the one who is wailing.

His tears fall into the whipped cream, punching craters into its pillowy softness.

He feels dizzy and sick. His head is so heavy, he starts to lurch forward, against his will; he is falling, straight toward the pie in his hands…

Cecil jolts awake to a face-full of pillow.

He rolls to his right and stretches his arm, only to meet empty bed. His hammering heart just about stops entirely. But, no, that doesn’t mean— Carlos can be somewhere else without being dead. Carlos has been… somewhere.

He rolls back over and his cheek hits the hard edge of something— of… something. His hand scrambles for it. His phone. Right. His phone, which he takes to bed with him so he can be close to Carlos, who is somewhere far from home, only accessible by cell.

“Carlos,” Cecil murmurs, and voice-activated calling takes care of the rest.

It rings once, twice, three times—and Carlos isn’t going to answer his call, he remembers now. Carlos is the one who does the calling, on his own schedule, and he is not going to answer, and Cecil is not going to know for sure for hours or maybe days whether or not he is—

“Cecil? Hey.”

The sound of Carlos’s voice makes Cecil feel much more awake and clear-headed. “Carlos! Is it you?”

“Scientifically speaking that’s not the easiest question to answer, but for the purposes I think you’re inquiring, yes.”

“So this isn’t a prerecorded message you’ve left on your phone for me to find in the event of your death?”

“Of course not,” says Carlos, sounding puzzled, though that might be the static. “That’s not a very statistically likely scenario. What time is it there, Cecil?”

“Early,” says Cecil, then reconsiders the quality of the darkness in the bedroom. “Or really late? One of the two. I had a bad dream. So I called. Is this a bad time? Do you need to call me back later?”

“No, no. It’s fine, if you want to talk about it. I was… dead?”

“Maybe. Steve Carlsberg did a terrible imitation of you at the Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest. I was going to throw a pie at him, but then that dream-thing happened where I stopped being able to move so I _couldn’t._ ”

Carlos snorts.

“It’s not funny! I was scared!”

“Well, please rest assured that I am _fine._ How soon is Thanksgiving? I haven’t really been able to keep track, what with time being weird.”

“Today,” says Cecil. “Or the day that this day will be once it’s had the chance to wake up properly.”

“Are you going to the contest this year?”

“I don’t know… ugh. It’s important to attend, but after this dream… and last year was such an utter disaster.”

“Last year wasn’t so bad. I thought we had a good time.”

“Despite your redeeming presence, it was the worst Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest in the history of Dead Citizens Impersonation Contests. I never should have entered to compete! I still can’t believe that Steve Carlsberg’s impersonation beat mine.”

“Your soft meat crown _was_ a little too big. It kept slipping into your eyes,” Carlos says in the way Cecil thinks of as ‘not realizing that relaying factual information sometimes comes off as really judgmental.’

“But,” Cecil protests, “my vocalization was so good that it shouldn’t have mattered! I spent weeks perfecting my Town Elder Councilwoman Wilhelmina impression. I mean, who cares that nobody alive now has ever heard what she actually sounded like? It was like no one in the crowd had even the slightest appreciation for the amount of library-based research and combat that goes into recreating a historically and regionally specific dialect… _I lost a toe._ ”

“I never noticed you were a missing a toe,” Carlos interjects.

“It grew back right away, the way toes do. But that’s entirely beside the point. The point is I practiced those early-nineteenth-century diphthongs for _days_. Steve Carlsberg always impersonates Night Vale citizens who have died in the past decade. It’s just not right.”

“It does seem a little… too soon?” Carlos hazards.

“It’s not insensitive,” Cecil corrects him. “It’s very rarely insensitive to pay mocking homage to the recently deceased. It’s just lazy, blatantly crowd-pleasing behavior. What will our history become if we keep reiterating the importance of the same contemporary figures? How will we keep our unmentionable past alive? I’d like to see Steve Carlsberg disqualified from the contest for life.”

“Hmm,” says Carlos, noncommittally. “Wouldn’t that take all the fun out of it for you, though?”

“What? Are you suggesting…? I don’t throw pie at Steve Carlsberg because I _enjoy_ it, Carlos. I do it because it’s my _civic responsibility._ ”

“Ah,” says Carlos. “Right.”

“You didn’t even throw your pie. You made us bring it home. You made us _eat it._ ”

Carlos laughs. “I promise it’s a pretty typical custom outside of Night Vale, and it’s important for us to share our traditions. Studies—granted, not the most scientific studies, but studies nonetheless—have shown that it’s a crucial part of building healthy relationships.”

“I try to be culturally sensitive,” Cecil says, “but you know, you’re raised a certain way, under a certain regime of indoctrination, and it becomes difficult to accept practices that aren’t those you’ve grown up with. Something like eating pie on Thanksgiving is hard to understand because it completely defeats the whole purpose. How are we supposed to be thankful for what we have unless we first mindlessly throw it away?”

“Hmm,” says Carlos again without saying much. “The pie was delicious, though, wasn’t it?”

“The best thing I have ever tasted,” Cecil agrees adoringly.

They lapse into companionable silence. The sun is starting to come up, which could mean just about anything.

“I wish I was there to spend Thanksgiving with you again,” Carlos says eventually. “No one should have to spend the holiday alone.”

“You’re not alone, Carlos.”

“I meant you, Cecil,” Carlos says softly. “You shouldn’t have to be alone.”

Cecil cradles his phone closer. “Carlos?

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask… what are you thankful for this year?”

Cecil holds his breath during the pause that follows.

“I’m thankful for ninety-seven percent battery,” says Carlos.

“Oh,” says Cecil, deflating.

“Oh?”

“Well—“ says Cecil, pulling Carlos’s pillow against his chest. “I guess, I was kind of hoping you were going to say that you were thankful for…well, me. Is that sappy? That’s too sappy, right? And selfish.”

“Cecil… no, that’s exactly what I—“ Carlos sighs. “I’m glad to have my phone almost fully charged so we can still stay close, even while I’m in this desert otherworld. Since you know I don’t really use it to talk to anyone but you, I thought I could imply that you are what I’m thankful for, without saying it outright. That’s what I was trying to do.”

“Oh! Oooooooh,” croons Cecil. Then huffily: “But you could have just said it.”

Cecil can practically hear Carlos roll his eyes. “I love you, Cecil.”

“I love you.”

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

“ _Happy Thanksgiving._ ”

“Cecil, please not the Town Elder Councilwoman Wilhelmina voice.”

“Well, good-bye to you, too.”  



End file.
